


Invisibility

by Dienaziscum



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Insomnia, Nightmares, Original Character(s), POV Female Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, depending on the angle of your read, implied suicidal intent or murderous intent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 16:19:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17328353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dienaziscum/pseuds/Dienaziscum
Summary: A mother stays up late in her shabby Bucharest apartment, tending to her feverish young son. Her upstairs neighbor is having an even worse night, from the sound of it. She doesn't know why he's having a hard time, and she certainly doesn't know that he is James Buchanan Barnes, international fugitive, suspected to be the notorious Winter Soldier. But she's had plenty of her own hard times, so she takes a risk and offers him a small kindness.





	Invisibility

It is exhausting work to make oneself invisible. Alina is very good at it by now. Her father had taught her to be silent and small, and her husband had taught her to disappear inside herself altogether. Somehow, even that hadn’t been enough. She’d left too many pieces of herself scattered, and he’d picked up every one of them and turned each into a weapon.

But when he’d started leveling those weapons at her son, she’d flooded back into the shell of herself and become solid. First, a shield; and now that they’ve struck out on their own, a fortress. For her son, she is bedrock, but that solidity is a secret just for him. Everyone else sees only the loose sand and chaff on its surface, something fleeting and forgettable.

The dark-haired man who lives above them is invisible, too. Sand and chaff, just enough substance to him that nobody finds him disconcerting, but not enough so that anyone might stop and take notice, pay him any mind.

Alina tries not to see him, but she fails. He knows it, and he works harder to avoid her than most others in their dilapidated building that crowds up, forgettable, amongst so many others just shy of Bucharest’s center.

Tonight, the invisible man is screaming.  
  
She knows this only because she sits in her battered chair nursing a cup of tea, bleary-eyed but vigilant as she watches her son sleeps off a fever on their bed in the corner. Her chair is directly beneath the thing into which the invisible man is muffling his screams--a mattress, a sofa, a stack of pillows. Perhaps he lies curled on the bare floor, as she has done, and buries his face in his own arm with the teeth sunk deep into flesh.

It is even more exhausting work, she knows, to try to stifle such eruptions, to try not to burn alive in the magma when one’s own fragmented bedrock is cracking wide open. She has her son to consider, when saving herself for her own sake and forcing the rifts closed seems otherwise impossible.

Alina wonders if the man has any such person to serve as his anchor. There are never any visitors that she has seen. The muffled, erratic chatter of phone conversations never issues from above, as it does from the neighboring apartments on her own floor. Inside his apartment, she has only ever heard him speak very late at night, and always to himself. His words are indistinct, filtering down through ceiling and floorboards; sometimes they are frantic and accompanied by pacing or thudding, sometimes sharp and cruel without any discernible sounds of movement at all.

The screaming doesn’t last.

In the ensuing silence, Alina rises and goes to her son. Despite the creaking of the mattress springs, he doesn’t stir, and when she bends to kiss his brow, she finds it slightly damp, blessedly cooler than it had been the last time she’d checked. Finally, his fever has broken to allow for deeper sleep. At least one of them will get some rest tonight.

She puts on the kettle for another pot of tea. Nimeni nu știe mai bine unde strânge cizma, decât cel ce o poartǎ, she writes on a scrap of paper torn from the back of an old secondhand book. Her calligraphy is beautiful, but hesitant, where once it had been bold and assured. She folds the note and tucks it onto a saucer beneath a chipped cup. The paper keeps it from clattering too much as she locks her door behind her and makes her way up the stairs, steam from the tea she'd poured rising in little white curls through the stuffy air.

Silence, still, as she stands before the man’s door. She had intended to set the offering down in front of it, just knock and flee, but she finds herself rooted to the spot, listening so keenly that she sways forward.

A slow, metallic scraping: a pistol’s slide being pulled.

A long pause, and then a sharp clack: the slide, released.

This sound has never meant run. It has always meant be still, be silent, be sorry; disappear.

Alina knocks instead, so quietly she fears he may not hear. She can hardly hear it herself, her fingers rapping on the rough wood as her own pulse rushes, thunderous, in her ears.

“I’m all out of honey,” she blurts, too loud in the quiet dark of the hall. Ridiculous; it sounds like an accusation. “I’m sorry; I know it’s late, but--hello?”

An eternity elapses. She should never have intruded. Should’ve let him go on, unnoticed, just like she’d have wanted. But she’d never gone so far as to---

“Don’t have any.”

Alina startles badly; he must be right behind the still-closed door now, given how close his voice sounds, though she’d never heard footsteps. She hisses as hot tea spills over her wrist, but she manages not to drop the cup and saucer.

“Just sugar.” His Romanian is precise, but it is strangely devoid of any accent that might tell her what region of the country he's from. She will wonder, later, how hard he has had to practice to shed this identifier, how many others he might've shorn away along with it.

“Well. I made you a cup anyway," she says. "Of tea. In case--I thought you might like some, is all.”

Another eternity.

The door scrapes slowly open.

“I’m sorry,” the man says before Alina has any time to react to the sight of him, pale and haggard, standing all curled in on himself. She can’t see him shaking, but she hears it in his voice.

“You’re sorry I made you tea?”

“Sorry I woke you. That’s why you’re up making tea.”

“You didn’t. I was up anyway. My son was sick.”

The man shrivels even further; he hasn’t looked at her once, eyes fixed on the floor and only warily darting up to her hands. “God, the kid. I’m _sorry_ ; I didn’t mean--”

“You didn’t wake him, either,” she says, and somehow, it manages to come out soothing rather than afraid. “He’s sleeping well, now that the fever has broken.”

Something not quite like a smile flickers at the corner of the man’s mouth. “Good. I’m glad,” he says, voice dragging as if through gravel.

“But I think maybe you aren’t sleeping so well. I know it’s hard to, sometimes.”

He does look at her, now, as she holds out the saucer for him. Underneath his own baffled surprise, Alina thinks that he can see how well-acquainted she is with the minefields of sleep. When he takes the tea, his fingertip brushes over the red splotch on her wrist. “Run that under cold water,” he says, “or it’ll blister.”

Her heart breaks just a little at the tentativeness of it, as if he doesn’t trust himself to be gentle, or as if he suspects she might dissipate upon contact.

“I will,” she says, and turns for the stairs. When she shuts herself back inside her own apartment, she still hasn’t heard the click of the man’s door closing. It’s a long while, just as she’s nodding off to sleep beside her son, before she finally hears the soft shuffle of his footsteps retreating into his own invisibility again.

**Author's Note:**

> Alina's note to Bucky is an old Romanian proverb. Translated literally, it means "No one knows where the shoe pinches, but he who wears it." In other words, nobody can fully understand another person's hardship or suffering.


End file.
